She says they knew they were gravitational waves because they were the shapes expected when you solve Einstein's equations with a computer - they realised it was from the collision of two black holes. How's your math for managing that kind of equation?

Gabriella Gonzalez shows the distortion of space time in a wave form on her display. As she noted earlier, it's important to make the distinction between the thing you are looking for and local 'noise'.

LIGO, the detector has been looking for something very tiny. If we were trying to measure the distance between the sun and the nearest star 3.25 light years away - in that space, LIGO has been looking for something about the width of a human hair. Pretty impressive.

Pack 30 x the mass of the sun into a space at half the speed of light and crash it into another thing made of the same stuff - that's a colossal event in the universe - and one that would generate gravitational waves. Amazing.

Scientists said on Thursday they have for the first time detected gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesized by physicist Albert Einstein a century ago, in a landmark discovery that opens a new window for studying the cosmos.

An artist's impression of a growing supermassive black hole located in the early Universe. Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, astronomers found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.

"They're waves, like light or any other kind of electromagnetic radiation, except here what's 'waving' is space and time itself,. You get radiation, basically light, when you move some sort of charged particle. When you're moving masses, you get gravitational waves."

A United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket with NASA?s Orion spacecraft mounted atop is seen in this handout photo after the Mobile Service Tower was finished rolling back early on December 4, 2014, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 37, Florida. The launch of NASA's deep-space Orion capsule on a test flight around Earth was delayed on December 4 after a last-minute technical problem with its rocket, NASA said. REUTERS/Bill Ingalls/NASA/Handout via Reuters

WASHINGTON No negotiations can be held with North Korea until it improves its behavior, a White House official said on Wednesday, raising questions about U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's offer to begin talks with Pyongyang any time and without pre-conditions. | Video

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